Brazil's comics coup: nationalizing the funnies

ByMac Margolis, Special to The Christian Science MonitorSeptember 22, 1982

Rio de Janeiro
— Once it was said, with pride, that a Brazilian politician had not made the grade until he had been savaged by the country's iconoclastic cartoonists.

So it is rather ironic - and a sore point - that the pages of Brazil's prestigious newspapers and magazines have been dominated by characters like Charlie Brown, Little Orphan Annie, and Blondie.

Starting this week, however, Rio's respected Jornal do Brasil is correcting this anomaly. It is ''nationalizing'' its funny pages. In its Sunday edition, the Jornal made a splashy announcement, heralding the debut of a legion of home-grown cartoonists.

The paper's official explanation for the move is that foreign, mostly American, comics just don't take here. But it also appears to be an attempt to appease local artists who are miffed at the ''near monopoly of the foreigners, for decidedly economic reasons,'' as Luiz Fernando Verissimo, the Gary Trudeau of Brazil, gripes.